Method 1. Restore Deleted Files on Mac from Trash
When is this method useful?
Trash is a temporary storage area for recently deleted files, which stay there for 30 days before automatically becoming deleted. As such, this method is best for addressing recent data loss, such as when you accidentally delete the wrong file.
What’s great about Trash is that it’s 100% reliable in terms of data recovery results. When a file is moved to Trash, it’s like when a file is moved to a regular folder. In fact, the actual data typically remains in the same exact physical location on your hard drive. That’s why you can move very large files in the blink of an eye.
Recovering deleted files from Trash is then, from the technical point of view, a simple matter of telling the operating system that you don’t want to allow other data to overwrite the deleted file when the 30-day period is over.
When should I try a different method?
Not all deleted files end up in Trash. Here are some situations when this method is useless:
- You’ve used the Option + Command + Delete keystroke sequence to tell the macOS operating system to permanently delete a file without first moving it to Trash.
- You’ve formatted the entire storage device instead of manually deleting individual files.
- You’ve experienced a hardware-related data loss event, such as a broken hard drive platter or a broken connector on a USB flash drive.
- You’ve lost important data due to corruption or some other form of logical damage, including malware attacks.
In the above-described situations, it’s best to skip this and the following method altogether and move directly to the last three methods described in this article, which can be used to recover permanently deleted files on Mac and, in the case of the last method, repair physical damage.
Follow the steps below to recover deleted files from Trash:
- Open the Trash folder by clicking the Trash icon on the right side of the Dock.
- Select the file you want to recover. You can hold down the Command key while clicking to select multiple files, or you can click the left mouse button with the mouse cursor hovering over empty space and drag to make your selection.
- Finally, right-click any selected file and choose the Put Back option. You can also drag and drop selected files outside the Trash folder, such as to your desktop.
Disk Drill is a complete data recovery package designed to quickly and painlessly recover deleted partitions or deleted files from your Mac’s internal drives as well as various peripherals, including iOS and Android devices.
Overall Experience:
There are many file recovery software solutions for Mac, but only a few feel like true Mac apps. And out of those that are designed in accordance with Apple’s GUI guidelines, a small fraction delivers satisfactory results. Disk Drill is the best free file recovery software for Mac because it offers professional data recovery features in a sleek package.
With Disk Drill, it doesn’t matter what type of file you want to recover and from which device. This file recovery software supports hundreds of file formats and all commonly used storage devices, including Android and iOS smartphones and tablets.
Regardless of whether you need to recover a single document from your system drive or thousands of pictures from a memory card, it always takes just one click on the Recover button to get the job done. To reassure you that you’re recovering the right files, Disk Drill can preview the same file formats as your Mac.
To recover deleted files on Mac using Disk Drill, you need to:
- Download and install Disk Drill for Mac.
- Launch the application and locate the storage device from which you want to recover deleted files.
- Select the storage device, then click Search for lost data at the bottom-right corner of the window.
- Preview recoverable files and select a new storage location for restored data.
- Click Recover again to perform the recovery.
Included for free in the basic version of Disk Drill are Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery, two handy data protection features that allow Disk Drill to monitor your file deletion activity and retain metadata so that you can quickly and easily recover any deleted file with 100% success rate.
Advantages:
- Deep scan of Macs with M1 and T2 chips
- Supports hundreds of file formats
- Restores data from Android and iOS devices
- Time Machine scanning
- Comes with extra free disk tools
Disadvantages:
- The free version can only preview files
Supported Mac OSs: Mac OS X 10.6 and newer.
Supported Languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.
Price:
| Disk Drill PRO | $89.00 |
| Disk Drill Enterprise | $499 |
| Upgrade | 50% OFF |
| Education | 20% OFF |